Kicks, push…
[Video][Website]
[3.17]
Brad Shoup: Children just don’t understand.
[2]
Iain Mew: Not even the best skate song by a precocious teenager in 2012.
[3]
Patrick St. Michel: Looks like the Men In Black 3 money was really good for the Smith family.
[1]
Alfred Soto: Jaden’s got lots of dough. Figure he had milk money to pay for both sample clearance and locution lessons.
[3]
Anthony Easton: Rich men fronting about fashion and sex is much less interesting when done by bored teenagers, whose work and wealth are not their own — it might say something interesting about gender that Willow Smith’s work is much more interesting than her brother’s, but I am not sure what, exactly?
[4]
Jonathan Bradley: Even at its most banal, hip-hop has always possessed a frisson derived from its transformation of outsiders into insiders; even if it’s never explicitly acknowledged, rap is a story of people confined to the margins of American society forcing their way into the mainstream. It’s why, even at its most commercial, the music has always had a volatility and dangerousness not possessed by its contemporaries. It’s the sound of doors being forced open. Jaden Smith isn’t Chet Hanks — imagine him in a hoodie in a gated Florida community if you can’t understand why — but he’s close, and being born into the black upper class robs him of the marginal status most rappers occupy involuntarily. “Pumped Up Kicks (Like Me)” has him offering no alternative narrative, no reason to make his story one worth listening to. He makes reference to his dad’s Maybach, apparently without realizing that Hov talks about Maybachs because people like Hov aren’t supposed to be in Maybachs. “I’ll probably get some crap for this/from my parents and my sis'” he says at one point, but lil sis’ at least found a way out of the rich kid box: wild the fuck out. Foster the People is no one’s idea of wilding out.
[3]
Jer Fairall: Applying that creeping bass line from the Foster The People song towards something with an actual pulse strikes me as an improvement on one of the more listless hit singles in recent memory, but I honestly think that I could’ve rapped better (and less inanely) than this when I was 14.
[3]
Edward Okulicz: Look at him in the video, bright-eyed, dancing like he’s having the time of his life. Listen to the song and he sounds too bored to live, let alone have a pop career. I know the original “Pumped Up Kicks” was fairly sleepy, but if you take out the famous bit (the whistling) you’ve got to put something with some energy on top to compensate. Who knew there was such a thing as sleep-rapping?
[3]
Will Adams: The premise of Jaden Smith sampling Foster the People (colloquially known as “that random band that sings that song about shoes!”) looks terrible on paper. The song, however, is not. The sunny intro of the original works well when applied to lightweight braggadocio. It’s all a bit ridiculous, what with a 14-year-old claiming to run a whole city, and the chorus is disappointingly one-note, but I’d feel more comfortable dancing to this at a late summer party than to something whose lyrics discuss, you know, Columbine.
[5]
Andy Hutchins: Jaden’s the sort of kid that the soft-spoken maniac in the original would have targeted, no? The difference is that he’s wearing Chucks? Co-opting the track for airy bragging about things that 15-year-olds who do skate rap and big cat-patterned pants better than Wayne does is fun and inoffensive enough, but, no, Son of Jiggy, you did not kill this in any sense, not when I know Kendrick’s verse exists.
[3]
Michaela Drapes: If you’d told me that Will Smith’s kid would sound like a horrific splicing of Drake and Eminem, well, I would have rolled my eyes and said “Duh, of course!” Dreadfully flat and parched around the edges, Jaden’s best when riffing on teenage boy concerns like skateboarding without pads; I could have done without the flimsy swagger behind his gratuitous mentions of family, eating at Nobu, and cruising in a Maybach, though — but should I expect from Hollywood royalty, really?
[4]
Jonathan Bogart: I hope to God he has a normal enough life that, like the rest of us did, he’ll grow up to be embarrassed by the dumb shit he did when he was fourteen.
[4]